JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN

The emphasis in the small college is obviously placed upon
teaching--a profession, perhaps surprisingly, which few fac-
ulty know very much about. Most of us were educated to be
"experts" in a specific discipline, with the tacit understanding
that knowledge of content assured ability to teach it to others.
As teaching assistants in graduate school, most of us were
tossed haphazardly into the classroom teaching role with little
preparation and even less supervision. Few of us had any spe-
cific courses geared to the profession of teaching. Although this
ironic situation is now being addressed in graduate schools, it
is nonetheless true that currently practicing college faculty
have had little preparation for their primary responsibility--
teaching well. What Gaff ( 1976:16) noted some years ago re-
mains a serious problem today:

[T]he fact of the matter is that our colleges and universities are now
staffed by faculty who, in general, have never studied the history of
their profession, are unfamiliar with the topography of the educational
landscape, are unaware of the professional literature in higher edu-
cation, and have never been expected to formulate systematically their

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